Supply Madness

[incognitus]

Do I understand this correctly, that even a port with level 10 can only ship 60 supplies and 60 fuel per day? I mean... that is very little for a full-scale invasion.

Is it true that when invading another continent it is better to take two level 10 ports and make sure the conquered territories expanding from each port never actually "touch" to make sure you keep getting twice the amount of supplies into the country?

More specifically: If I land one invasion army in Seattle, one in San Francisco and one in San Diego... do I have three times the amount of supplies available for my troops than if I conquered the entire US west coast?

 

[marxianTJ]

Well the other issue is the supply carrying capacity of the tiles leading from the port too.

When supplies drop into the port they create a stockpile (that stockpile can grow to whatever size it wants). Usually the problem you run into is that the stockpile's supply route is a less desirable route to begin with (for example going over dangerous territory, or around Africa etc). When you have 3 separate ports on a long coast, they'll all create a stockpile, but once your own lines touch the stockpiles will automatically merge - sometimes unpredictably. So a major problem of invasion forces over large areas is that troops in whichever zone is now getting supplies from a different port will experience intermittent supply shortages as they have to deal with receiving supplies from a new (probably further away) port. But the ship will usually right itself in a few days as supplies from the new main port start reaching your troops. The only time you get into *really* big trouble is if the infrastructure in the area is really bad.

 

[incognitus]

But how can that be? If a port can really only ship 60 supplies and I only ever use a single port to ship supplies, doesn't that mean that there will only ever be 60 supplies available to all my troops in the US? How much does that feed? 2-3 Corps?

 

[marxianTJ]

The *other* ports can still receive supplies they will just be teleported to the stockpile's port tile when they arrive. It's some magic handwaivery to prevent the system from going bananas (well more bananas). The interesting thing is it makes TRA plane supply drops easier to orchestrate because you know exactly where all the supplies are (in the stockpile).

Basically you want to look at the stockpile the same way that you would your nation's capital - and this is where they can punish you.

So say you have a stockpile of x supplies and x fuel. Your troops demand x amount at midnight, the stockpile will ship these out - but let's say your troops discover new supplies ahead of them (they take an American tile that had supplies in it when they stepped into it) those supplies that were sent y days ago, will be sent *back* to the stockpile and will be useless to you until they get there. In the same way that they would behave with your capital.

You can also manually set up your convoys to send extra supplies to your other ports - but they will all go into the stockpile first.

 

[incognitus]

Okay, so that means, if I hold the entire west coast of the US and I manually set up convoys to supply Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego (all level 10 ports) and Los Angeles (level 8), my troops will have a total of (60+60+60+48=)228 supplies available to them? The US obiously have no more ships in the Pacific, so there is no convoy raiding.

 

[marxianTJ]

Somewhere in there it depends on the port sizes and I'm not familiar with those right off hand - the only real hangup is when you abolish one stockpile for another by combining your lines - you'll usually get a momentary hiccup and nothing more extreme than that. The only time you'll get into trouble is if you do something extreme - like say invade from East and West coast - and then when the two finally meet one 1/2 of the army is going to have major supply problems for a few weeks lol.

 

[incognitus]

Thanks for the warning. I had tried that, I had actually conquered Florida as well as Boston and New York (trying to take all their ports so their fleet dies), but they would still have Panama, so I decided to withdraw from the east coast and commit all my forces to my invasion from the west. We'll see how that works out. It's still only 1937 and I have conquered about two states in from the coast now.

 

[Kovax]

The 60 supplies may vary depending on your techs, from what I understand. Not sure if it's Basing or whatever, but you should be able to ship more than 60 to a port. As said by Marxian TJ, you can send supplies to multiple ports to increase the total available to the troops at the front, but it will all (except for whatever gets used locally in the province) move to wherever the depot is before being shipped to the front, and some will then be lost due to distance from the supply depot in that area of operations (again, depending on tech levels).

The real problem comes in when the game creates a supply depot at one end of your area of operations, and there's bad infrastructure between there and the other end of your contiguous provinces in that occupied area. Worst case for you would be if it set up a depot in Alaska's Aleutian Islands, and your forces on the East Coast would need to draw supply all the way across the continent, through the limited infrastructure of Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. Japan frequently runs into the situation where it sets up a supply depot in the peninsula east of Beijing, and then those supplies have to be shipped overland to SE Asia and eventually India, across some horrendous infrastructure. Basically, it's next to impossible to operate in India, since any supplies that the Japanese player sends to ports in India will route back to northern China before being put into the supply chain.

 

[incognitus]

I thought there's a supply block in the form of zero infrastructure provinces running from the soviet border to the sea in indochina to prevent this from happening?

 

[Wraith11B]

He was just making an example, but yes, those two techs in the Theory page (Supply Organization and Supply Transportation) combined with the Basing tech in the Naval page (under the Trade Interdiction Doctrine) will increase the capability of your forces to move supply across whatever area you need them to.

 

[Kovax]

I thought there's a supply block in the form of zero infrastructure provinces running from the soviet border to the sea in indochina to prevent this from happening?

Those blocks were added just because of the issue. Another was put in running from the Sahara Desert to the coast of Egypt about a dozen provinces below Suez. The problem still exists, they just band-aided the symptoms.

 

[incognitus]

How aptly I named this thread... look at this:

Don't you think I should get more than FIVE UNITS of IC from conquering all this territory? I had 171 when I was just Japan (and Portugal) and conquering two thirds of the US has given me 5 extra IC. I remember in other games that conquests would seriously increase my IC.

 

[marxianTJ]

*most* of the US's IC is in the NE around Ohio and Pennsylvania - which is *somewhat* historically accurate - most industry was in what is today the "rust belt" for example the 2nd largest steel mill on the planet was in Gary, Indiana (nearish to where I live) - eventually Japan built one even larger, and then China one even larger still so you can kinda see how that went. The biggest was in the USSR at Magnitogorsk which was built specifically to be slightly larger than Gary's US Steel plant.

It's actually partially what makes a European invasion of the US really easy, because you immediately land on top of *most* of their IC and once you take it they can't even afford to reinforce what they have or produce supplies for it anymore. Most of the West was either rural, involved in resource extraction, or shipping/logistics - there was very little actual industry West of the Mississippi until the 1960s.

 

[Count Blue]

Don't you think I should get more than FIVE UNITS of IC from conquering all this territory?

I believe oversea IC dont count the same way landlocked does.
That puts Japan for IC gains in a difficulty position.

 

[incognitus]

It is silly, though. Once I hit 100% conquest and took over the US, my IC jumped from 178 to 376 overnight. And I had already conquered the rust belt up to Pittsburg and the East Coast up to Norfolk.

 

[Kovax]

Part of that also depends on your occupation policy. The mildest form of occupation (collaboration government?) only gives around 5-10% of the IC, and then you've got the "different continent" penalty on top of that. Once you annex it, that 5-10% goes up to 50% for a non-core territory, or 100% if you have a core, minus the continental penalty in either case.

If a player lands on the East Coast and blitzes the major IC centers, it can cripple the US in a matter of a couple of weeks. You won't defeat them for a while, because of the scattered VP locations, but they're down to a tiny fraction of their previously formidable IC base.

 

[incognitus]

I see. Thanks for the feedback.

 

[incognitus]

Supply madness indeed. I don't get it, I really don't. When I had Scandinavia conquered as Japan, all that area was supplied through Oslo. When I held the Iberian peninsula, it was Lisboa, then after taken France as well, it became Marseille. After taking Germany and Italy, it became Venizia for all of Europe, as there was a land (via strait) connection to Scandinavia now. After the SU fell, now even Korea and China are supplied from Venizia. Smart move.

But what bugs me the most is how the game handles out of supply units. In my attack on the SU, I send a small corps (three units of 1 LARM, 2 AC, 2 SP-R-ART or so) down to cut a corridor all the way to the Caspian sea and take Astrahan for 5 VP. Once I had the city, I broadened the corridor to a minimum of 3 provinces for easier supply and strat moved one infantry corps down there to hold the area. This core was on and off "out of supply" for the next 3 months, for absolutely no reason. The worst thing is when you send a unit to move between two huge provinces, the trip is scheduled to take like 2 months and then 2 days before it arrives it gets out of supply and is magically teleported back to square one. Man, I am THIS close to playing arcade mode anymore...